Carole Douglas - Cat in a Midnight Choir

The white-painted motel named in the mermaid’s honor bore a huge new sign of its own, a temporary banner stretched over the portico:

PSYCHIC FAIR

Temple’s foot hesitated over the brake for a heartbeat. She’d attended a psychic fair once. Even knew a few psychics. Maybe one of them would have a clue about the strange five-sided figure that had scribed professor Jefferson Mangel into a circle of death only a couple weeks before.

She was sure that the figure meant something arcane. Who better to ask than a psychic? It was doubly a pity that poor Jeff was dead. He was the one objective expert on the mantic arts she’d trust to have a scholar’s dispassion on the subject. But she couldn’t consult him anymore….

Or could she? What had Max said? He’d borrowed some Ph.D. theses that mentioned the mysterious entity known in some magic circles as the Synth.

She twisted the small steering wheel right to shoot down a side street, rather dingy in this near-downtown neighborhood. Max would have wanted her convertible top up, pronto, if he were along. But he wasn’t, and she quickly turned around in a deserted gas station lot and got back on Charleston heading west.

She hoped Max was at home and feeling like company. Maybe she could also find out what he had done lately to put Molina in her rabid-rottweiler mood.

The house was a picture of housing development serenity, like its neighbors. In the nearby houses, though, people were really away at work and school. Behind this house’s hooded windows, Max probably spun plots like a spider in a suburban web.

Temple parked the Miata three houses down and hefted a businesslike folder from her tote bag. Maybe she’d be mistaken for an Avon lady if anyone was watching.

If anyone was watching. At the very least Max was. Like a spider, he was supersensitive to any stirrings on the fringes of his gossamer empire.

Why was she creating such unattractive metaphors for Max’s perpetual state of siege today? Had Molina really gotten to her this time?

Temple paused in the sheltered entryway. Ringing the doorbell was a last resort. If Max was inside, he would materialize at the heavy wooden door and draw her within before anybody on the street noticed her.

When she came here Temple always felt like a magician’s assistant being shuttled quickly into the next disappearing lady trick, as if the whole house were only an illusion, one big revolving door into a maze fashioned of hidden compartments and deceptive mirrors and sliding false walls.

Temple stood in the shade of the portico, designed as shelter against the daily Las Vegas Heat and Light Show. The door did not so much open as dissolve into deeper darkness.

A hand, pale as a formal glove, reached out to draw her inside.

Her eyes blinked, unable to adjust to the interior shadow.

Max’s hand, conversely as warm as it looked pallid and cold, pulled her through the entry hall and into the well-lit rooms beyond.

Her eyes, still blinded, rebelled at the rapid-fire change in light.

“What brought you here without phoning first?” he asked.

“An interview with the vampire.”

“Vampire? Before lunch? Let’s go into the kitchen for a little healthy fluorescent light.”

Temple laughed. Max always managed to banish his own most powerful illusions. It was just a darkened house, after all, kept shuttered against the heat, but mostly so he could see out without anyone seeing in. That’s what a man on the run for eighteen years needed.

The kitchen was its usual gleaming, efficient self, the stainless steel appliance fronts reflecting and distorting their entering figures into gray alien forms.

“You didn’t say why you dropped by.” Max never forgot an unanswered question.

“I…I was happy.”

“ Was ?” He never missed an implication either.

She studied him as he leaned against the walk-in refrigerator front like an extremely suave corpse propped against his coffin. Or a space vampire against a high-tech crypt door.

His trademark black clothing underlined the image, but Molina had carefully planted the sinister side of Max in Temple’s brain. The policewoman had been working on that for a year, always questioning Max’s whereabouts, his history, his sudden disappearance and reappearance in Temple’s life. Maybe it was beginning to work.

Max turned away to pull open the stainless steel door, and spun back to face her, something in his hand. “Dreamsicle?” he asked

Molina’s evil spell of doubt was broken.

“ Dreamsicle ?” Temple slung her tote bag and folder atop the huge kitchen island. “Where you’d get that? I haven’t had one of those since I had scabby knees.”

“You never had scabby knees.”

“Yes, I did, and I sold lemonade at a stand, too.”

“Shocking.” Max handed her an orange-vanilla ice cream treat on a stick and unwrapped the thin white paper from his own. The label read Creamsicle now but they both knew these were Dreamsicles of old, of their youths. “And you worry about my past.”

Uncanny how he could always target the unspoken issue.

“I don’t worry about it as much as Molina does.”

“She doesn’t worry about, she just worries at it, like a demented Scottish terrier, only she would be an Iberian terrier.”

“Not necessarily. She got those blue eyes from somewhere. Why not a Scot?”

“Bagpipes in the blood? I don’t think so, Temple.”

“I just saw her.”

“Why am I not surprised.”

“She warned me about you.”

“I repeat: Why am I not surprised? That’s nothing new.”

“She warned me really, really hard about you. And she showed me something.”

Max managed to tense without visibly moving a muscle. Temple only noticed it because she knew him so well. He had that perfect concentrated stillness that the stage required, the sense of something tensile ready to spring, like a big cat.

He didn’t ask what.

“The ring,” Temple finally said.

“The ring?” Max unfolded his arms. “How the hell did she get the ring?”

“Found it.”

Max’s face broadcast consternation. “Found it? Where?”

“Actually a street cop found it. And where is the problem. At the scene of another murder.”

“A new murder? And the ring was by the body?”

“Not so old a murder, but not so new either. Gloria Fuentes. Remember? She was found strangled in the church parking lot.”

“I remember,” Max said grimly. “Another of your magic-linked murders.”

“Not mine. I just noticed the connections.”

“And the ring was there? But that was before —”

“Before what?”

Max relaxed enough to smile. “I’m trying too hard to anticipate you. Magician’s bad habit. You tell your story at the right pace.”

“It wasn’t very near the body, at least. Maybe ninety feet away at the edge of the bushes. In the dirt. My ring! In the dirt.”

“ Your ring?”

“Well, it was originally your ring, until you gave it to me. I think that’s how Molina thinks of it too. As your ring. As a nasty talisman associated with the demon Max. As more evidence to hang you with.”

“That ring,” he said faintly, blinking once. He leaned against the wall again. “That ring. So it’s found. Has been for a few weeks.”

“Isn’t that just the meanest thing ever, Max? Molina had it, knew she had it, and never told me?”

Max smiled again. “It’s mean, but that’s police work. It was a wildly out-of-place piece of evidence. Of course she’d save it for a rainy day. Apparently she decided on today to rain on your parade.”

“Well, it worked. It was horrible to see it in that tacky plastic bag, pulled out of a tacky desk drawer in a mean little office.”